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Superheroes Bullshit: Marvel

by:Pox

2012/06/27

In a previous article... wait.. I don't write article, I write nonsensical blurbs of crap.. Someone should come up with a new word for that...

So anyway, in a previous ...crapticle, I pointed out flaws in super powers from DC Universe super heroes because it's easy as hell and needs to be done so some day a movie writer finally consults with an engineer or a scientist and realizes that people are actually interested more in something when it's coherent.

Suspension of disbelief is great, except 100% of super hero movies ask us to use it every 2 seconds. How about YOU make some effort next time?

1. WOLVERINE

POWERS:
- Super Healing
- Indestructible Metal Skeleton
- Tom Selleck levels of body hair

Wolverine can heal from any injury extremely fast. ANY injury. You can cut off one of his legs and it will grow back. You can even grind him down to a few skin cells and he will grow back. This begs the very obvious question: how the hell is it possible that the earth isn't infested with Wolverine clones? Every time a hair would fall off his head, it would just grow another Wolverine.

One shotgun blast to the chest would displace enough genetic material to form millions of him. If he can grow back just from a few cells, how can those cells know if they're part of the main "original" Wolverine or if they were just scattered around by some random event? If you separate him exactly in two, how does each part decide whether it's going to grow back into Wolverine or not? You might think it's related to his brain or head, but no, if you blast that away it'll also just grow back. There is no part of him that is the core.

Another question: What is he healing with? When your body repairs itself, it transforms proteins and various other stuff into new bits of you. You could chop off his legs and seal in in an hermetic container and watch as he conjures matters out of thin air to repair his injuries. In reality, he'd need to convert whatever is around him, which would be scary as hell if you're standing too close...

What would really happen: The first time someone shot him, a cloud of blood and skin would instantly start converting millions of metric tons of matter into a new army of angry Wolverines, releasing in the process untold amounts of energy and gases. The earth would be destroyed.

2. CYCLOPS

POWER:
- Ocular Energy Beams

I already covered the beams with Superman so I'll just focus on one very retarded detail about Cyclops: He can't control his power due to brain damage so he must keep his eyes closed.

WHAT?

Here's what people at Marvel seems to have forgotten: When you lower your eyelids, your eyes don't go away. They're just BEHIND the eyelids.

Yes, for some reason Cyclops' beams are stopped by a 1mm layer of skin that is thin enough to still put you at risk of being blinded if exterior light is too intense. If you shut your eyes real tight in the center of the sun, you'd still go blind, ON TOP of being sunburned, which would be a real bummer.

What would really happen: He could never shut his beams off and die within about 0.001 seconds as his metabolism converts all available energy in his body into lasers.

3. SPIDER-MAN

POWERS:
- Super-Strong, resistant and agile
- Sticks to Walls
- Can sense danger before it happens

Spider-Man is a lot more tame than most heroes in terms of crazy powers. His brand of super strength is different than Superman's in that he can't lift planes or buildings so he doesn't have the same problems with physics. However, the chemistry of it just doesn't add up as his muscles can't possibly produce such energy outputs and he'd need to eat a ridiculous amount of calories.

Even the "Spider-sense" isn't so bad if you just reduce it to extremely fast reflexes. Really the worst thing about him is THE PROPORTIONAL STRENGTH OF A SPIDER. A 150 pound spider would NOT be strong, it would most likely be crushed under the weight of its own exoskeleton. The only reason insects appear strong is because they are small, if you scale them up they become exponentially weaker as gravity takes effect.

What would really happen: Grown men with the proportional strenght of a spider already exist and we call them quadriplegics.

4. THE HULK

POWERS:
- Impossibly Strong
- Instant transformation
I've covered the super strength and the Apache Chief growth syndrome previously, so I will focus on one detail that was talked about in the recent Avengers movie: Bruce Banner will turn into the Hulk instantly without being angry if his life is in danger. He mentions that he tried to shoot himself but "the Hulk spit the bullet out".

Wait.. WHAT? That means that somehow, he can transform into the Hulk in less time than it takes for a BULLET to travel an 8th of an inch? Just the air displacement from that sudden pressure change would create a nova-like level of heat and light. Bruce Banner could cause cataclysmic explosions just by shooting himself in the head. Unsurprisingly, that's the least insane thing about this. How does the biology of this work? His body knows exactly when an event is dangerous enough to actually kill him a split second before it does? The other alternative would be to transform into the Hulk every time Bruce Banner gets hurt. Just walking around his apartment barefoot in the dark would mean the whole block is one toe banging on a coffee table leg away from disappearing in a giant explosion.

Why did Bruce Banner stop trying to kill himself after that anyway? Can't he die of starvation? Dehydration? Hypothermia? If he starts freezing to death, will he turn into the Hulk and go on a rampage?

What would really happen: Pretty much the same thing as the comics except he'd constantly explode everyone around him at random.

5. KITTY PRIDE

POWER:
- Can Walk Through Walls
Last I checked, walls are made out of the same thing as floors.

What would really happen: The first time she discovered her powers, she'd fall through the floor and re-solidify 40 feet under her house in a solid block of granite, thus exploding. Speaking of re-materializing in granite...

6. NIGHTCRAWLER

POWER:
- Teleportation
Nightcrawler can teleport within a 1 mile ( or whatever) radius by imagining his point of arrival. WHAT? He uses his power indoors constantly without fear of teleporting his ass into a wall. Even if he knew the exact layout of a building, how can he make sure there isn't someone walking around in the room at that very moment?

Worse than that, when he teleports he would leave a vacuum behind since the air around him would now have to rush in to fill a new empty space. Now when he ARRIVES at his destination, he'd have to push all that air out of the way at insane speeds, thus generating a bone-shattering shock wave all around him.

What would really happen: Eventually, this:

7. CAPTAIN AMERICA

POWERS:
- Indestructible Shield
- Kinda strong. Kinda.

His shield is supposed to be able to absorb vibrations and energy. In the Avengers movie, he takes punches from The Hulk and deflects Thor's hammer with it. You can't do that. The energy has to go SOMEWHERE. " Ah, but it just bounces the blows back, thus conserving the energy!" You poor fool. You're probably thinking about this in terms of a ball hitting a solid wall. "See! Cap's shield acts like a wall! Makes sense!"

Walls bounce things backs because they have a large amount of mass and it is easier for the smaller object to head back from whence it came than to push the wall out of the way. That doesn't work when Hulk is punching you. When Hulk punches you, he's the wall. But ok, maybe the high speeds involved are just confusing your small brain, making you think that velocity somehow changes the nature of energy. Let's think about it differently:

Can Captain America's shield crush a bug?

If the shield deflects all energy then logically it would protect a bug from being smashed by a punch. Now slow the punch down. What if I just push on the shield? Captain America is shown multiple times pushing guys around with his shield. How does the shield know to dissipate the bad guy's punches but not to dissipate Captain America's pushes??? There is no different between a push and a punch in physics, it is just applied work to an area over a set amount of time. A push is low energy for long periods and a punch is high energy for low periods.

What would really happen:Captain America is maybe 2-3 times stronger than a normal guy while Hulk is in the thousands. If Captain America got punched by him, the shield wouldn't have a scratch but Cap would be turned into a cloud of blood and bone splinters. An ultra-rigid shield is the worst thing to absorb a blow since 100% of the punch's energy will be transferred to Captain's America's arms and face instead of being dissipated by bending the shield material.

8. THOR

POWERS:
- Only he can pick up the hammer
- Super Strength/ Flight
- Can control lighting

It's not that he's the only one strong enough to lift a heavy hammer, it's that the hammer...basically..refuses to be picked up by anyone else. What? This is like Excalibur basically. If you tied one end of that sword to a tank and stepped on the gas, it supposedly wouldn't move? Move FROM WHERE? The rock? What's the rock made with? We can dynamite the rock. Then what's the sword going to be held by?

So you see the problem here. When Thor drops his hammer, it just falls on the ground. But that's the same as someone picking it up. If you hold an object, all you're doing is exerting strength in the opposite direction than gravity on that object, thus preventing it from falling down and "holding" it. So, ONE, if you drop the hammer, it should just burrow all the way to the center of gravity of the earth, right? But doesn't that mean that GRAVITY can pick up the hammer?

So, SECOND, if you drop the hammer in space, where is it going to go? What would prevent you from lifting it then?

Ignoring all that, how does the hammer even know Thor's wielding it? Fingerprints? DNA? Can't I just cut off his hand, wrap it around the hammer and be good to go?

Lastly, why does he bother fighting anyway, he can control lightning. He should just sit on his ass and strike down enemies miles away from the skies.

What would really happen: He'd just kill everyone instantly with lightning, forget the hammer.

9. ICEMAN

POWERS:
- Can make ice appear out of nowhere
- Can lower temperature of things
- He's made out of ice??

Iceman's favorite way of traveling is to shoot a giant ice slide in front of him on which he moves around the city. ARE YOU SERIOUS? This leaves tons and tons of ice suspended above people's heads in populated areas, just waiting to melt and crush everyone's property. Whatever damage he's rushing into action to prevent will be made 20 times worse by his idiotic mode of transportation.

Secondly, where is all that water coming from? I've already covered the temperature changing thing with Superman, but ice also requires water. Yes, MORE THAN IS PRESENT IN THE AIR AROUND HIM. So really, Iceman's powers are kind of like the Flood story in the bible... Just a bunch of water coming out of nowhere and vanishing forever without a trace. Just think of how useful the power to create unlimited supplies of clean ice would ACTUALLY be...

There's also another large flaw in that he's made out of...ice... How does that work? Last I checked, ice can't move. If he's just one solid block of ice, where is his brain? His eyes? I'm FAIRLY confident you can't recreate each body part with ice and just have it work the same, I VAGUELY seem to recall chemistry being involved in body functions.

What would really happen: The first time he'd be turned into ice, he would just sit there motionless and melt to death.

10. MYSTIQUE

POWERS:
- Can turn into any person / animal she wants
Shape shifting is a power that never makes any sense. Aside from the conservation of matter involved here, there's a whole slew of questions as to what materials she can replicate. In the first X-Men movie, she turns into Wolverine and even has metal claws. SHE CAN BECOME METAL? If some part of her can turn into metals, why can't she just grow gun-arms or turn into a jet? How about her own Iron Man suit that pops out of thin air?

Why isn't she the most powerful mutant of them all? Nothing is preventing her from turning into Magneto and having the same powers since the whole premise of X-Men is that powers come from genetic changes.

There's another shape shifting problem that never comes up: What if you turn into an animal? You are your brain. If your brain suddenly becomes a bird brain, you cease being you.

What would really happen:She'd turn into an eagle because she'd think it's badass and instantly forget she ever was a human, living the rest of her life as a mindless animal.

QUICKIES

GHOST RIDER - Where are his eyes??

GAMBIT - So he can turn things he touches into bombs. How does a thing know where it ends? If I touch a chair, how does the chair know it's not also part of the floor? Gambit would destroy everything.

ARCHANGEL - Do you have any idea what kind of wingspan would actually be required to keep a 200+ pound man airborn? Not to mention the caloric expenditure and pectoral muscles. This guy would have to live in a hangar.

IRON MAN - See Batman

Mr. FANTASTIC - Can he stretch.... EVERYTHING...?

The HUMAN TORCH - Same as Ice Man... If you turn into fire, you will just die. You can't build a brain with fire.

BLACK WIDOW - Look, women can't beat men in hand to hand combat. Sorry. Even small men can't beat big men in combat, that's why the MMA and boxing have weight classes. If you're a henchman for Dr. Doom, chances are you'll be more than strong enough to beat up any woman on earth.